ONE
I have a high regard for serendipity. How many great discoveries are made by accident? Yet, as the sage says, chance is an elusive butterfly who only roosts in ripened minds. So I prepare.
I seek my luck by fluttering from leaf to leaf. The merchants and the men of busy-ness damn me as indolent and curse to see me lying in the sun. But, like the spiked jaws of the flame-tongued flower, I am ready and when fortune lands I snap her up.
It was my Day of Heritage, the day I came of age. We had a custom then that on this day a boy, a man new-made, got from his father some small portion of inheritance. I never had a father, nor a mother in my memory. Dom Inigo, our priest, had raised me up himself. He said I had a father in the sky, a mother in the church. On their behalf he lifted from his shelves the New Compendium of Wonders of the World, a book I’d often seen before but never been allowed to touch “I give you your inheritance,” he said and handed it to me.
I took the book and took myself down to the beach. I passed the fishers at the dockside. I could hear them grunting as they hauled the heavy baskets. I could smell the stench of rotting fish mixed with the sea mixed with the sweat of men. These are the scents of home. One fisher paused to look at me. They think I am a curse. A bastard who has lost his mother must be twice accursed by God. I have been set apart from them. I trotted on, the heavy book held safely to my chest, my forearms crossed across it, cradled, hugged to me. My Heritage. The fisher spat. “Spit once to warn of wickedness, spit twice to turn its arrows from yourself,” the village children sing. He spat again. I looked away.
It was my Day of Heritage. I was alone.
It should not be like this. I should be laughing, drinking, celebrating, being cheered.
I walked across the empty sand. The sea stretched out for evermore. It had no shape. The sky was void. I was alone.
I clambered on the rocks. The surf rolled up and roared and sucked away and came again like generation after generation of our lives. It was my Day of Heritage. I was a man. It was my day to roar. I was alone.
I stared to the horizon over the chaotic waves. I felt that I was peering at the past. The waves were father after father till the first man at the dawn of time. Except that I was looking to the west. Except my father’s name I did not know.
He said: “I give you your inheritance.” He cried. I’ve never seen him cry before. He has been strong. He carried everyone. At sick beds and at death beds and at funerals he is the rock of God whom everybody leans upon, from whence they draw their strength. He tried to hide his tears but I could tell.
Why did he cry?
The wind blew out from shore towards the setting sun. Clouds gathered overhead. The dark was risingfrom the waves. Gulls called out like abandoned souls.
He has been acting strangely over several weeks.
Far out at the horizon is a strip of sky which has a paler colour than the rest. It is as if God lights the distance as a promise that however far you stray you will be always in his sight. This is the point where sea meets sky. Beyond that point the new lands lie.
I thought of Christal Colon stepping on that undiscovered shore. The future’s like a prayer before it’s said. It is a child before it has a name.
The son of the Adeletando got one hundred golden Benitos to cheer his Day of Heritage. The farmer’s son received one hundred roods. The two twin boys of Mario the fisherman were given by their dad a boat to share. No craft should have two masters as the proverb says. They quarrelled and the twin who was left-handed disappeared; his body never was washed up onto the shore. I was the priest’s adopted son, the son of nobody. I got a book.
The wind changed. Now it gusted from the south. It brought with it the old unappetising smell of decadence. Fdar out across the water rain began to fall. The storm’s black clouds obscured the sun. It grew much colder.
Why then did he cry? I opened up the book.
I turned the pages over randomly, submitting fate to chance, embracing destiny. I learned of Pyramids: that these were Joseph’s barns where in the Years of Plenty, Joseph had stored up the grain of Egypt that he might disburse it when the famine came. I read of Prester John, the Ethiopic Christian king, born of the line of Sheba, lion of the lands beyond the sand. I turned the page again and felt the breath of fortune whisper in my ear. I read of Petro de la Hoz.
The place was marked with heavy use. The corner of the page was torn. Dom Inigo treats books so carefully.
Don Petro de la Hoz, I read, was born a hangman’s son the year that the Assassins were excluded and the Emperor, awash with gold, adopted bankruptcy. The situation was precarious. Don Petro’s father’s salary unpaid, the family soon found themselves in debt. Anticipating prison for his debt and knowing how unpopular he might prove with the other prisoners, the father tried to kill himself. Those years of practising his trade proved his undoing. His was a skill of torture rather than of death. His art was leaving victims still alive to shriek beneath the disemboweller’s knife. The father hanged himself, and lived. Months later, now a broken man from wheel and rack but with no burden on a soul confessed before the Office of the Questioning, the father paid the penalty for tempting suicide. They soaked his shirt in sulphur when they cast him in the flames, that at the gates of heaven he might be distinguished from the martyrs, most of whom were likewise charred.
Below this story was the graving of a thickly planted garden, gone to seed and wild, with unproportioned plants, and in the centre was a gallows tree. It was entitled Mysteries. A serpent circled round the tree. Tree-climbing snakes insinuate their bodies into little crevices as if their flesh was water but they cling as firmly as a glue.
I felt that what I knew as sure and solid suddenly became as soft and turbulent as was the ocean which surrounds the Earth. It flowed in whirlpools of anarchic chaos. It was primal emptiness. It was as sterile as the shifting sands that vortex through a clock, as desolate and empty as the dead.
There was a note which had been written in the margin in Dom Inigo’s own hand. It stated “Most of this is true.”
He used to lecture me on iconography: the study of the symbols used in pictures and the meanings they present. Thus, of the saints, the gospel writers carry books and Peter keys. An apple represents a woman and a dragon wickedness. I knew a garden meant the origin of life, a gallows death. What of a snake around a tree?
I shivered as the wind grew stronger and began to groan and turned and blew in from the sea. I closed the book and squeezed it up beneath my shirt against my flesh to save it from the spray. I scrambled down the rocks. I trudged across the empty beach. I climbed the weather rotted steps up to the dusty street. I walked, alone, towards the church.
I have lived all my life in Avaho. It teeters on a narrow strip of fertile land between the barren desert and the uninhabitable sea. Its harbour had been unregarded for a thousand years because it faced the ocean out beyond the pillars of the hero-god. Men trade from place to place but Avaho faced nothingness. The people lived on fish and what they grew. Then navigators set out for the setting sun and found the westward islands and the shores of Africa, the island of Brasil and new lands further to the west which they believed were Cipango and Cathay. Avaho became a busy port. The second sons of clerks set out from here to chance their destinies as lords of fortune or as lunch for Calibans. Whichever wind their luck, they left luck here. We prospered and grew rich.
I hesitated. On the street a large, excited group of youths in tunics, drinking wine, were seeking sport. They laughed and waved their hands and talked to solve the problems of the world and wrestled when a woman was in sight. I feared their violence. What had they left to do? The galleons which link us to the new found lands are bigger now, too big for Avaho. They use another port. The sea is ever changing; it sows salt. We were a fishing town again. The desert blew its sterile dust across our fields. It buried us.
I knew each of the boys. They were all, more or less, my age; most of them past their Day of Heritage. The Dom had taught them all. I was a willing pupil; they were goats dragged to their learning by a leather strap. They hated me.
I stood aside and watched. This was my Day of Heritage: I should be with them, laughing, drinking, celebrating, being cheered. I shrugged my shoulders out of their habitual hunch, stood upright, opened up my chest and fastened on a smile. They were acquaintances. Contemporaries. Never friends. No. Never that.
One of them tried to jeer at me; the rest of them ignored me. I wondered which hurt most.
I would be lonely in a street packed with as many people as the drops of water in a stream.
The church was trailing paper flags and streamers: cheap, cheerful decorations, bright and colourful, without a soul. That year, my Day of Heritage was Mardi Gras. Tomorrow started forty days of sacrifice. See? Serendipity! Who says coincidence is but the child of chance?
I marched up to the church and went inside, remembering in time to cross myself and kneel before the Holy Table of our god. I scurried up the stairs to where the father had his little library.
“Dom Inigo,” I cried. He was not there. The candle guttered in its holder on the reading stand. He had been here a little time ago. My glance fell on the folio. It was a gathering of manuscripts. It rested open on the “Tragic History of Petro de la Hoz”.
A fragment, nothing more. “Now at this time,” I learned, “the people of these islands were most fearsome callibans. They organised an annual man hunt in the spring. These things were an abomination in the sight of God and through his mercy they were struck down with a plague of pox, that now these islands and those swamps are desolate. And he among us who did lustfully seduce the tribeswomen, God cursed with pox of venery and scabbed his cod.”
The room fell into darkness as the candle died. At once I smelt the perfume that is present only at that instant when the flame expires. I have been told this is the incense of the candle’s soul. I wonder, will my own death smell as sweet?
Then I became aware that I was not alone. Some body, or some thing, was creeping stealthily towards me in the dark. “Dom Inigo!” I cried, in fright.
“Well? Is it you?” the priest snapped testily. A flame was kindled and a tall new candle lit and set upon the stand. “I went to fetch this candle just in time,“ he said.
“What is this book?” I asked, all innocent, waving a disinterested hand towards the pile of manuscripts.
“A mishmash,” he replied. “Well? Have you had a merry Day of Heritage? Where have you been?”
“Down to the beach.”
“And is that all? No more to say? What did you see, what did you hear, what did you do?”
How to express what Dom Inigo is to me? He raised me up. Like any son, the man was hid behind the father till I left his house. I was his son. He should have been like god to me: unknown, immovable, immense. But stepfathers are different; I don’t know why. He always seemed worn down by life. His hair was thin and falling out and touched with threads of grey. His face was gullied with anxiety. His lips were pinched together and his eyes were dull. He spoke with short, sharp stabs of petulance.
When I was little I had thought it was the height of life’s achievement to be village priest. A town like Avaho, the rattling shell of what it was, is focused on the church. The church was like a tombstone for the town, engraved with memories. And that made Dom Inigo like a keeper of the dead; him and his dusty histories. He was an old dog now: lame, toothless,; stretched out in the dust beneath the shadow of the church.
“I read the book,” I said, “you meant for me to read. I want to learn of Petro de la Hoz.”
“It would be better not to know.”
This from a teacher! I just stared at him. “But you gave me the book.”
He nodded heavily. “I wish that I had not,” he said. “If you would travel through the jungle you do not need books, you need a heavy axe.”
“Tears from a snake,” I cried. I showed to him the picture at the centre of the book. “A gallows in the garden of the world. It quotes the text but mistranslates the words. What does it mean?”
He used his seeking look on me, the look that squeezes truth from you. He closed his eyes. He took the lenses from his face. The candle flickered cruelly on the leather and the lines. It made me sad. He had been father to me. He had so much learning and compassion. He had sacrificed himself.
“Look at these spectacles,” he said. “There was a proverb in my youth: there is no truth in curving glass. Now I look at the world through curving glass. How can I trust my eyes? We each of us perceive a tiny splinter of the truth. No man can know another man. A pot broke in a thousand pieces may be reassembled if you have the years. Each piece would have a place to fit together in the whole. But with a man ... We’re made of pieces which do not belong. These pieces do not fit and will not fit and never fitted and yet we try to make them fit. No man can know another man: truth has too many shards.”
I looked into his haggard face. What did I care for him? He was remote and crotchety: a nagging father and a feeble man, obsessed with care. He had a priest’s ingratiating voice and patronising air. He had vast learning, there was little doubt of that. But there was no-one in this town who could appreciate how vast his knowledge of authorities to quote. Perhaps that’s why he’d educated me. The book explains that god created man so he would have a being who would worship him. That’s sad.
I did not stop to think. Without this man I would have been a beggar. He had fed me, clothed me, healed me, taught me, worked for me and prayed for me. Why, therefore, should I seek Petro de la Hoz? It must have been as bitter as a knife to him.
He was a sad old man. What good his learning, what use the years of candlelight which he had wasted bending over books? Now he was trapped in empty Avaho. He used to speak of service. “Man was born to serve,” he would declare in swollen tones. Priests stifle doubts. There is one truth and that is god and that is absolute and there cannot be any versions of this truth and it is one and indivisible. How can you argue with a man like that? “Man has been born to suffer and the highest honour that a man can have is that his fellows let him wash their feet.” It would not satisfy myself.
He was not satisfied. The world holds priests in low esteem and he would often give a bitter sermon on the theme of honouring your father which, deciphered, meant your priest. I think he knew how little I respected him. Young men are arrogant. I hurt him and I knew that I was hurting him and I felt wretched for it afterwards but I could not stop hurting him. He hurt me too. It just went on and on.
Why is there always such a gap between the people that we know we ought to be and the pathetic, selfish ways that we behave? If ever man was meant to serve it was not him. He hated poverty. He used to lecture on and on about the vanity of bishops’ carriages; he was a jealous man. To show off might indeed be, as he said, the signature of childishness, but vanity corrodes your soul more slowly than the sin of jealousy.
He should have been a bishop. Had he been a bishop I suppose he would have ranted at the mock humility of black-garbed parish priests. Or the extravagance of cardinals.
I am not seeking to find fault with him. Sometimes I pitied him. But let me praise him. He was honest. He was always patient and polite. He cared for others and he put their needs before his own. He was forgiving, generous and sensitive. But he explained to me one day that he was full of shame and guilt. “The motives of a man born to a crown in heaven are as selfless as his acts. At least a sinner has a lot of fun whilst in this world. What is the point of service if you are so dry inside that you resent each act of kindness that you wring out? I am already dead. This world is hell. I am a sufferer in hell.”
He had his days like that, days he would fasten on a fate-faked smile and whistle down the road towards the paper-bannered church. Then there were other days when he could lose himself in pettiness. “These are the rules by which you should behave,” he would declaim and heaven help the man who wore the wrong hued shirt to church on the fiesta of the mountain saints. He drove himself into the ground “because self-discipline is all” and he did not acknowledge any right but his to drive his fellow man. Do this, not this, not this, not this, and never smile in Lent. There was no place for songs or laughter in his life. He was a blossom who had withered on the bush.
I was a butterfly. Here was no sustenance for me.
“I want to know.” I was insistent. “Tell me now.”
He sighed. “I’ll tell you this. Don Petro de la Hoz. He was not born a Don. His father was a common man, a gardener.”
“I thought his father was a hangman who was burned.”
“According to the Law they burn in the same fire as a suicide all that he owns. All his possessions: wife and children too. They go with him to hell. But in this case the priest could find no record of a marriage and the woman claimed the child was authored by this gardener and he agreed.
“The gardener, Fernando was his name, was born a peasant, an illiterate. Yet he aspired to be a priest. He found work in an abbey. There he studied hard and learned the properties of many plants. The priests, of course, said this was not enough. They said he had to know the Holy Book He could not read. So he was angry, claiming always that it was his low degree of birth that made the monks refuse him. This is right and proper for a monastery is a sacred place. It must not be a shore line for the drift wood of this world.
“A short time after that the monks began to die. The gardener was jubilant. He bragged about it in the taverns of the town. ‘God will exalt the meek’ he boastfully declared. ‘Our Lord said publicans and sinners come to me and yet these monks say go away.’ The tavern keeper, who did business with the monks, reported him to the authorities. He was arrested and thrown into jail for witchery. The next day he was freed. The Law said that he could not be a sorcerer. He could not read. How, therefore, could he learn the chants and incantations of the devil’s lore? On his release he fled the town. No more monks died.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked. He looked at me. His glare said do not interrupt. His teaching voice continued with the tale.
“By the time that he met Don Petro’s mother he was gardener to God. As gravedigger, he planted bodies in the earth. There they will blossom on the day that Christ calls forth the dead. He also kept the paths well-gravelled and the grass cut short. As sideline he grew flowers he would sell to mourners visiting the graves. He had a passion for the flowers called ‘Justinians’ which for their beauty do despise the rainbow but whose leaves are bitter and promote the flux.
“Now it happened that when Petro was a child of four or five, the Emperor rode by the graveyard and admired the flowers there. Never had he seen, he said, such radiance, such brilliance, such fire. He called Fernando and he quizzed him deep of botany. There on the spot he made Fernando servant of the palace (gardener, fifth class). This had a salary but it was never paid because the realm was bankrupt once again.
“And so the little family was moved into a shack within the palace grounds.
“Fernando was no gardener in anything but name. He knew some hidden thing (I do not know exactly what) about the root of the Justinian. It was this lore of plants that bound him to the Emperor. And all these things are evil, unfit for a church.”
“But you have told me nothing of Don Petro de la Hoz.”
He turned on me with anger in his eyes. “And do I have to spell it out? I’ve taught you everything. You’ve taken all I had to give. Are you so stupid that you do not understand? He was your father! Don’t you know it yet? Why else would I give that book to you upon your Day of Heritage? He made me swear. He made me swear. I promised I would tell you of your parentage when you became a man. But not before. I swore. And you who had no father till this day must understand so well why I should tell you of Don Petro’s stepfather.”
I sat there silent, numb, unseeing, hearing nothingness.Though I had guessed so much out on the windy shore. I’ve wanted this so much, so long. It seemed to me a huge thing, larger than myself.
“I don’t believe you.” I denied the man. “It can’t be true.” I was dead, dull, dispirited. “You lie.” But why?
“For years,” he said, “I kept the secret from a little boy. You did not need to know. Then, as you grew, I felt the weight of secrecy. It was like being stoppered in a flask and bursting to get out. I felt as if I would explode. I prayed to keep my vow. Each night I prayed. About a year ago I realised that soon you would be old enough to know. What had stretched like eternity now seemed too short a time. It was as if the wine went sour. I did not want to tell you then. I wanted to forget Don Petro de la Hoz. Why should I drink the bitter cup? Why should I sacrifice myself? I was the man who brought you up. I wanted you to be my son.”
I stared across the room. The yellow patches of the candlelight danced on the wooden wall. His face was turned away from me, his eyes looked at the ground. The shadows emphasised the aging of his face; his features sagged like raindrops petrified in time. From far away I heard the waves against the cliff. It must be nice to be a bird, I thought.
I felt betrayed. “So all this time I thought I had no father when in fact... How could you be so cruel to me? You are a teacher. What was it you always said? A teacher is the enemy of ignorance. A little learning can illuminate the world. How could you leave me in the dark?”
He looked so small and sad. He was my priest. Respect your God, the saying goes, respect your parents, then respect your teacher.
“How could you?” I was furious. “How could you be so arrogant? Don Petro had two fathers, I had none.” I saw him wince. The arrow hit its target but I did not care. “How dare you think you know what it is like to live in this damned town...” He cringed. He hated blasphemy. “...this God-forsaken town when you are fatherless.”
The cold, like sorrow, rose throughout the church. I felt a surge of rage. Abandoned by my father. Who was I? “You did not even have the honesty, the courage, the integrity...” I did not know what I was saying, words just came unwanted to my bitter lips. I stuttered and I spluttered and I kept on hurting him.
“Who was he?” I demanded. “I. Abandoned by my father. Who are you to let me down like this? Are you a God that you should hide the truth from me? What was he like? What was my father like? For God’s sake tell me now.”
“What was he like?” I asked the priest and saw him shrink and watched his eyes grow older and more dead.
“He had two fathers, like yourself. And you, who thought you had no father till today, can only know what that must make a man.”
“Only me. Yes. Only me. You, sure as hell will take you; you have no idea. That’s obvious.”
“He had two fathers: one who grew and one who culled. Inheritance will tell. Don Petro grew to greatness and he caused great misery.”
“How dare you say that?”
“Look into my eyes. Your father was the greatest sinner of the age”
I would not look into his eyes. I only knew that I was caged. Don Petro was the open door.
“You lie!”
“I knew your father well.” There was a note of pleading in his voice.
“You don’t know anything.”
“I am the father who has raised you up. You are my son. Do you not owe me anything?”
I looked at him. His eyes were bruised, bewildered. Shadows soiled his face. His cheeks were thinner than I had remembered them.
“I owe you nothing, priest,” I spat. “I’m not your son. I never will be. I’m the son of Petro de la Hoz.”
His shoulders slumped. “You have to find out for yourself,” he said. “Stay safe, my son.”
“I’m not your son!” I screamed. I turned and ran towards the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To find my Heritage.” I slammed the door of the scriptorium, I tumbled down the stairs, I ran across the stone floor of the church. I heard his footsteps follow me. I hesitated. He was chasing me. The old man panted after me.
“Don’t go!”
I flinched. He was the rock, the solace, strong. He was a holy father. Other people cried. He comforted.
“Where will you go?”
“I don’t care where I go as long as it’s away from you.”
He started speaking in a voice I’d never heard him use before. “You have to cross the desert. Go to Macassa. It is a big town and a big town breeds big badness. Be aware. Be careful of the evil of the city streets. Beware of Don Alfonso; he is wickedness. He knew your father too. Beware the Lady of the Iron Rods If you escape from Macassa, where then? To Kouss? You must not go to Kouss. The Prince-Archbishop there is Satan’s slave. Where then? The mountains of the North are wilderness: they say the forest has returned to beard La Hoz. Stay safe, my son, stay safe with me. We will explore the world with books. Already you have learned so much. Already you have travelled far, to places you can never reach by journeying, not in a thousand lifetimes. And if you cannot help yourself, if you must know of Petro de la Hoz, we can research his life in manuscripts. I dare say we can track him down more quickly in the word than in the flesh. For it is truly said that wisdom is the better part of bravery.”
He stood there, flushed and sweating, grey. He trembled. I was young and strong and proud and arrogant and I did not believe that I would ever die or age and I despised his weaknesses. “You have imprisoned me in Avaho,” I snarled. I pushed him and he staggered back. “Leave me alone, old man,” I sneered. “I hope you die. I never want to see you any more.”
I turned my face away from him and walked out of the church and down the empty street towards the desert and the north.
